Digital Photography Techniques

Topics

Artifacts can appear in tone mapped high dynamic range (HDR) images that are the result of movement in the scene. Rough spots (as seen in this figure) happen in tone mapping when you have motion that oscillates[more…]

Photo shoots are often exciting, especially when you're shooting high dynamic range images. The scenery is beautiful, and you’re pumped to get good shots. It’s easy to be swept up by the fun and start[more…]

Today’s brands of cameras rely extensively on auto this and auto that. For HDR photography, one of the consequences of this is that many amateur photographers don’t learn how to use their cameras like[more…]

The bottom line when processing your high dynamic range photos is this: Your HDR images are yours. Ultimately, what you create should appeal to you on some level. Start there. Be comfortable with that[more…]

Try this simple rule when composing a scene for an HDR photograph. It will have a profound impact on how you compose it. Take a picture of something. Not anything. Not nothing. Take it of a thing you can[more…]

Here are three helpful hints and reminders for helping you get better at HDR photography, and a couple showcase images to help steer you in the right direction. There are certainly more ways to shoot better[more…]

The number one way to ruin a good HDR image is the dreaded halo, and the second is ghosting artifacts. Your photos might be perfect, but they don’t need halos to prove it. The figure illustrates a nice[more…]

Imagination is a powerful thing when preparing HDR images, a fact that is made more obvious when you see the result of not using it versus using it. The top image in this figure is an HDR image of a local[more…]

If you get caught up in perfection, you’re primed to over-sharpen your HDR images. Photographers are sometimes obsessed with sharpness in their photos. They want everything to be pixelly perfectly sharp[more…]

When you run into a situation with your high dynamic range photographs and it seems like nothing you do is working — the settings don’t look good, the image feels wrong, the effects are all bad — relax[more…]

Sometimes too much of a good thing (HDR processing) can be a bad thing. Sometimes when people first start working with HDR, they generate HDR images and then tone map it with the most absurdly unrealistic[more…]

A lot of people wonder why on earth you would want to convert a high dynamic range (HDR) image to black and white. In general, you should convert an HDR photo to black and white for the same reasons you[more…]

High dynamic range (HDR) photography excels at emphasizing contrast — and not just in color but in black and white, too. Black-and-white photos are beautiful studies in contrast. With color removed from[more…]

Sometimes color high dynamic range (HDR) photos just don’t look good. For whatever reason, this photo, a single-exposure HDR image, is such a case. The color version, as you can see, just isn’t that interesting[more…]

One option to create black-and-white high dynamic range (HDR) images is to convert your color photos to black and white before using them to generate the HDR image. You have two options to choose from[more…]

If you convert your high dynamic range (HDR) images during Raw conversion, you must shoot your images and brackets in Raw and be prepared to convert them to black and white in your favorite Raw converter[more…]

If you want to convert your high dynamic range (HDR) images to black and white, Photoshop Elements has a handy Convert to Black and White feature that gives you some creative control over the process.[more…]

Most people don’t think of using gradient maps to convert high dynamic range (HDR) images to black and white (also known as grayscale), but the results are very good. A gradient map is nothing more than[more…]

Photoshop has a very powerful tool to convert color high dynamic range (HDR) images to black and white. It gives you a significant degree of control over how the final image looks. You can turn blue skies[more…]

One option for colorizing black-and-white high dynamic range (HDR) images in Photoshop Elements is to use the Color Variations tool. Several controls are available here with which you can increase or decrease[more…]